One night Calvin and Eve are visiting their neighbors and news of the Cuban missile crisis comes on TV. The nervous Calvin insists that he and his wife, Eve, go down to spend the night in the elaborate shelter he has built under their house. That very night a jet plane crashes into their house and Calvin decides that is a nuclear bomb since he cannot see what it really is. The very pregnant Eve gives birth to their son, Adam, soon after they have been in the shelter.

The three of them end up spending 35 years in the shelter because that is the half-life of radioactivity and they would then be safe from the side effects of nuclear fallout. The fun begins when Adam emerges from the shelter on his 35th birthday to a world he has never experienced before.